


Please Whatever They Offer You Don't Feed The Plants

by imahira



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: 1980s, Canon - Book, Derry is Terrible, Gen, Other, POV Second Person, Period-Typical Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-07-18 01:10:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19966255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imahira/pseuds/imahira
Summary: Bitter ground makes for bitter harvest, and bitter harvest is all you know or need.





	Please Whatever They Offer You Don't Feed The Plants

**Author's Note:**

> I've been listening to the Losers' Club podcast and their love for Mike inspired me.

This town loves back, and this town eats the little flowers that that sprout up in its ground. It likes them best young and tender, but it’s always willing to make an exception for those who love it. Love is the finest seasoning. Corny but true.

It’s started on you already, Mike, you know that. You’ll never leave this town. No one knows Derry like Mike Hanlon. And to know it is to love it, as the Good Book and Phil Spector both say. It was this town ate your daddy right up, Mike, and don’t kid yourself that you’re too good to be sloppy seconds. Don’t ever forget that you’re not too good for _nothing_ in this town.

An old man here for the microfiche looks past you for the _real_ librarian; you show him to the machine just as you have every other Sunday for 4 years. Bad luck at the grocery store this week, it’s the woman who won’t take money from your hand; you set it down on the counter and make sure those around you hear your “Thank you.” A boy of maybe 13 gives you a dirty look as you pass by one of the Bassey Park benches devoted to creative expression; maybe he adds a few choice lines about you to his little graffito, gratis.

Why don’t you take another trip out of town but stay for good this time? Tell them all to go to hell, just drive and drive, pressing harder on the accelerator as you go, the fields racing by alongside you, and maybe in a few hours, a few days, you’ll be brave enough to check the rearview window.

Or maybe you’d never stop checking. Maybe you’d keep your eyes fixed behind you and drive straight ahead backwards, back too far and too long ago to ever make it back to the starting point, not in this lifetime. Because this town, this beast, its claws sink deep like roots, and they grow and they grow. And you stay. The sap in a Venus fly trap, the frog impaled on a butcherbird’s stake, the Renfield, the Seymour Krelborn—you’ll get that one in another few years, Mikey, if you make it that long. If the Aladdin can see its way clear to showing a Jew movie in this grand modern age of the 1980s. You stay and you wait to call the ones you love best back to this hell on earth.

Home. Their hell, your heaven. If you put the two together, what does that leave you with but earth? Earth thou art, and to earth thou shalt return, and in the meantime thou shalt chronicle the life and times of this storied old shithole by the sweat of your brow, lo these many years, or words to that effect, and who the hell do they think they are running away from all this?

Derry loves ya, Mike. And love, true love—it always wins out in the end.


End file.
